Actually, minions can and will get buffs from the party. This is sometimes totally fine (banners and the like), sometimes bad (shadow refuge to skip mobs) but they do get buffed.
Also its perfectly reasonable to play Necro. PvE isn’t really as much about profession, so long as you can bring DPS/utility and know the encounters, WvW necros are good and always have been okay, and in sPvP players like Zombify have shown time and again that just because Necros aren’t “viable” doesn’t mean you can’t kick butt (its just hard).
I understand your point of view. However I don’t know how you deal with the fact that we have no vigor but I oftenly find myself in the situation that I get a facepalm from many mobs, boss, traps, whatever because I run out of endurance.
I’m not saying I never go down (although this is almost my first hardcore PvE binge since the few months after launch), but generally speaking it isn’t a big deal if I do, because when you are stacked its about a second for everyone to pick you up.
Don’t get me wrong, if this build is working for you, and you aren’t massively hurting your team by taking it (and I don’t think you are), then run it. I just think its a bit subpar.
@Bwab, not sure if this is true after patch, seeing as the greatsword warrior now does some pretty decent damage, necro will always be that forgotten profession left to die in a corner, next to a ranger. Soon to be joined by mesmer.
Almost certain its still true, seeing as in a group we can abuse all the same mechanics they can (new runes, sigils, etc.).
yeah. Still really enjoy the profession though. Especially with the rune and sigil changes. Makes me feel so much better.
I still enjoy the profession, but I’ve been leveling my alts more seriously for when I end up in pug groups that lack some vital utility (like a thief for avoiding mobs), because I really can’t justify sitting on Necro if the team is struggling and I can swap. But in organized groups I love it.
Bad defensive options, lack of good weapons, no meaningful PvE utility all really hurt the profession.
You don’t need the amount of tankiness this build gives, even in a highly unorganized situation; I’ve solo’d bosses when a group went south (long enough to res all the other players) with a lot less investment. All you need is the 50% minion HP, and your minions have enough defense to tank a boss long enough to give your group breathing room.
Our point is: you never need this much defense, no matter how awful your group is.
Necromancer has higher single target damage. Warriors just bring much better everything else.
Gyler brings up a good point. I personally use a minion build for PvE, but only when my group is not capable of stacking effectively. Otherwise Spoj’s build is absolutely great, and is massive damage (and survivability isn’t an issue if you’re in a decent group/using DS). Also, your build is lacking a lot of damage that you could get out of a minion build, so its not even the max damage a minion build could get.
A minion build will never out-DPS a full DPS build, mainly because minions don’t have the multipliers to really take advantage of a coordinated group. They just make things a lot easier in less-organized content.
Basically, I go into every dungeon with spoj’s build, and the first time my group obviously displays the lack of ability to stack properly, the minions come out.
The trait is okay, I still think it could be a little better (the first time you use it will stunned it breaks the stun with a significant ICD), but its not awful. The issue is its our only good access to stability and its completely inaccessible except for semi-tanky power builds, and non Dhuumfire condi builds (who really can’t use it much anyway).
Whatever happened to the underwater golem shark?
Those “leaked” patch notes were fake.
Clerics MM in PvP is very strong, as long as you understand the limitations of your roaming.
Minion/condi hybrid isn’t all that bad, especially with the new krait runes. Not my personal favorite, but mainly because of a small lack in traiting/weapons. Still a fun build to do though.
I think Shelter has enough things that really hard-counter it (I’m pretty sure right now you fully prevent it, not just put it on a few second CD if you interrupt it). Necro has a ton of ways (especially if they have stability up) to do something to it, and some other professions can as well.
If they gave us almost any ranged power weapon, axe would drop from all of PvE, just like it’d fall from PvP if they gave MMs another weapon. I agree its better than staff, but that isn’t saying a whole lot either.
Honestly if you play a bit on other professions, you’ll realize how incredibly lacking we are on good weapons.
Its an issue of pathing, including what you are saying (but not necessarily limited to that). If you sit on one point an entire game, no problems at all, if you try to move from point to point (even taking a very nice path) they are liable to mess up a bit.
Generally speaking, just leave them desummoned when you don’t need them (this should be how you operate anyway for everything except bone/blood fiend).
A weapon shouldn’t be god awful if it isn’t traited. Even traited axe has only ever been used in DS LB builds due to it being better than staff for a short time.
Good point about the death magic changes, I forgot about them! With those in mind then yes, it’s possible that MM is now actually stronger, if only a bit. And the greater choice of sigils also helps with their lack of mobility and utility. Maybe I shyould try it too :p
At low levels it doesn’t take much to make them work, just find a playstyle that fits you and just try to force people to 1v1/2v2 you.
Mobility can also be worked around in a lot of games with proper use of warhorn/flesh wurm.
Really the key to making MM work at any kind of high level (sub competitive, since there are still issues to bar the build in general from that), is just a lot of experience and knowledge of how minions act and how to work with their quirks.
Not exactly a newsflash, but I want two things in particular.
1: A new M/GM trait for the blood line that transforms the vampiric traits into something actually useful while promoting the healing power attribute. Ideally it should make the vampiric traits work at equal capacity regardless of the number of targets present, and should probably also be exclusive to non-minion builds since minion necros would otherwise have access to two powerful sustain traits. Something along the lines of “if you control no minions, Vampiric and Vampiric Precision gain a 1 second ICD and scale more effectively with healing power”.
Assuming the trait is balanced, MMs wouldn’t give it up over VM, and going 6 into the tree would force them to drop Training or Death Nova, both of which are very strong drops for more siphoning.
I haven’t noticed that many more MM Necros, I still see mainly Condi necros in solo queue, not sure about hotjoin though, I only play hotjoin when testing builds. I myself play full zerk necro and still get players calling me OP :p
Not that zerker necro is OP (its still totally not viable) but that first time you get dropped from half HP to dead in one hit you kind of have to sit back and contemplate the meaning of life.
Except that you can see from the earliest cases of DS being the current transform DS, that weapon swapping was a option (way back from 2012), thus not being a bug (the demo releases/technically vertical slices were polished out of bugs), nor was it ever mentioned as such by devs.
Tho yes they just decided not to fix it back when they went bonkers.
No, the loss of weapon swapping was a bug. The patch where that happened, ANet (as has happened in other situations) screwed up something in the code that made DS lose the ability to swap weapons. The bug is the loss of swapping weapons, and they just decided (for whatever reason) to not fix it.
I dunno if I have enough experience with the class to contribute.. but I think Necromancer SHOULD have more interesting death-related (and condition-related) abilities. Such as:
- Create a death nova when target dies.
- When target dies, its conditions are spread to nearby target
- Make fear a true interrupt, add a trait for like 8x bleed on interrupt.
First off, really interesting ideas, and actually really good ones that are easy to implement/balance. Btw, fear is an interrupt now, so go crazy with perplexity runes.
I think Necromancer should excel at AoE “condition control.” Weakness in particular is a very powerful condition that few classes have much access to. Another idea harkens back to the GW1 Mesmer and “hexes.” Something like ..
- Curse of Weakness: Target produces AoE Weakness. Each time target attacks in the next 5 seconds they apply 2x Bleed to themself.
- Curse of Betrayal: Target’s next AoE attack affects their allies.
First is a really cool idea, would also introduce the ability for us to finally get spiteful spirit again (pls lawd gimme dat SS). Second one would be really interesting, but I doubt they would introduce it.
Another idea kinda pulls from the Death Shroud mechanic. What if there were different shrouds selectable (sorta like rangers pets) that offered different effects?
- Blood shroud: Constantly drain your HP, each spell inflicts an additional 5x bleed.
- Horror Shroud: Each attack has a 25% to inflict Fear. Drains 4x faster than Deathshroud.
- Revenant Shroud: Minions damage boosted by 50%
.. Hope I didn’t just repeat ideas from someone else’s post. x.x
First two are interesting ideas. I really want more punishment on the class (not sure if those are the way to go but its an idea). I dislike the last one simply because frankly I wish that even Training of the Master didn’t exist as it does now. I’d much prefer minion traits that affected and played with their active skills, since those are more skillful and less “summon minions and afk”.
One idea I had was to introduce Orders as toggle-based AoE effects, like Auras are handled in Path of Exile, if you’re familiar. When you turn them on, they have some negative effect, such as losing a % of your HP every second or self-stacking conditions. Those self-effects could then have play with our own skills already (like self stacking a bunch of conditions then plague signeting them off), or new traits.
The Orders themselves would give a unique, unremovable buff to allies in the area, giving them things like lifesteal, condition application, increased stats, etc. The skills would have no CDs (just maybe a 1s one per toggle) or very short ones, but would be gated by the negative effects they applied to you.
No, more is 100% necessary, and is also easier than trying to balance what already exists.
However, I want new weapons more. Some professions simply have far too limited of weapon options atm.
I don’t think we need DR, or any caps on CC. However, CC should not be hitting hard. At all. If a warrior is stun locking me, I shouldn’t also be taking a ton of damage from the hits that are stunning and knocking back. Same thing with necro fear, this should not be hitting hard at all. It’s this concept that a lot of abilities fall into: they do too many things, so it’s very effective to just use them whenever.
Unfortunately I don’t think ANet is ready to actually buff Necromancer damage if they take away Terror. All that’d happen is they’d get rid of it, and then tell us to suck it up because its “one of the strongest traits in the game” (yes I’m still bitter about Putrid Mark).
And CC would still need to not stack. Its still far too easy to perma lock people in stuns, and even if you aren’t dealing damage the rest of your team will kill them. Not to mention that any loss of damage on CC skills will result in damage being added to non-CC ones.
Only in GW2 do necros summon flesh bags. All the other necros in books, stories, other games actually raise the kittening dead. Why couldn’t anet do this? Now we only have these half dead ‘creatures’ that don’t do anything.
Because that is the universe and lore they decided to create.
Still think a dhuum terror necro is still our strongest build, People just run from my MM necro which is fine since I’m probably just staying on home point, but with the dhuum terror necro people will try to fight and by the time they realize they might lose its too late.
Completely different builds. Dhuum terror can’t hold points anywhere near as well as a properly setup minion build will, but can put out much better teamfight damage.
This all seems pretty accurate.
The thing that bothers me most is that a necro doesn’t feel like a necro. The only thing u get from people dying is some life force, while a necro is someone who manipulates and raises the dead. Aside from minions (who are just dumb punching bags) and life force there is nothing really necro-y about this class. The ideas listed above me I like a lot and seem to do this. But I wish u could just summon peo- wait… What if there is a new weapon that focuses on minions? 1- send out an undead knight to attack and bleed your foe. 2- summon an archer to cripple your foe. 3- raise an undead warlock to burn your foe. 4- send out an undead wizard to cause vuln on your enemy. 5- release a horde of undead animals to bleed and poison your foe. Lol, might be OP but would make this class more interesting, necro-y and add a new weapon to the necro kitten nal. (Which there have also been complaints about) this idea just came to me so don’t judge too harshly.
All minion weapons, except maybe an off-hand, will never happen. Also your ideas aren’t GW2 Necro-y, since we don’t strictly raise undead, we just raise golems (although you could change your ideas to fit that pretty easily).
Just stop with the stacking CC, and don’t allow things like stuns to apply to an already stunned target. No more free “I kittened up but it doesn’t matter l0l” cards, but make it so attackers can’t just roll their face over the keyboard and stunlock you.
I just meant the art assets. Aside from designing new weapon abilities, I imagine adding a whole slew of new weapons to the game would be a major hurdle.
Technically true, however every profession (even warrior) still has a few weapons they could get access to. The real difficulty for them is that they have to add weapons completely equally between classes, so if we get a new weapon, everyone else gets one. But certain professions really need them more than others, and Warrior for example has so many weapons that they’ll bar the rest of us from getting some. I really hope ANet stops trying to be “fair”, and instead of giving warriors weapons they just fix some of their current weapons, since warriors have awful diversity.
Do ranger/mesmer pets inherit their AI the same way? I assume not for the ranger, their pets are pretty good at negotiating terrain relative to our minions.
Ranger yes, Mesmer not sure. The one thing about Mesmer is that since their summons are out for such a short time the pathing AI issues rarely affect them.
Ranger gets a lot of help because they have buttons to screw around with, and can also swap pets. So instead of waiting for them to have to die, you can just swap your pet out.
Minions have the issue the worst because they are out until they die, and in certain game modes that can be a long time. I suggest in PvE content you just desummon them between areas (especially since skipping content is so common), and only summon them once you are ready for a pull (also please for the love of god don’t be the one to pull with minions out). In PvP try to limit how much you take a path your minions can’t follow you on.
There could be one issue though. The UI would easily allow for the utility cds to be displayed because all it shows currently is a locked skill. But what about the regular weapon cds? Or the shroud cds while you’re not in DS? Should any class generally be able to see any weapon skill cd while they’re on a different set?
Of course, all of this would be nice but at the risk of cluttering your UI, especially if you’re playing ele or engi with a lot of kits. Should necro utility skills get “special treatment” just because the UI space is there and unused?
No weapon CDs or anything like that, just like every other profession. It’d just finally act more like a weapon kit/attunement, where you can always see the CDs of swapping, and CD of utility skills, but not anything else. It’d just basically line us up with what is normally done.
Well there are 2 points to that: a) weapon swapping in DS should come back, it was gameplay nuance removed for the sake of removing it instead of actual balance or functionality reasons
a) It wasn’t removed “just for funsies”, it was a bug that they figured… eh screw it we’ll leave it in. They literally just accidentally broke DS and then decided to not change it.
Wouldn’t that mean that if we trait for it we would have 12 seconds of stability without boon duration? Also wouldn’t have spectral skills too much stunbreakers?
Yes. Rampage as one is 20s of stability, plus fury, swiftness(?), and might on attack for both you and your pet, and that is without traiting, so I think 12s stability needing 4 traits investment and/or boon duration is perfectly acceptable.
And spectrals would have a lot of stunbreaks, but that isn’t really a bad thing, its pretty common on other professions for stunbreaks to be centered on one area.
I’ve been seeing a lot more MMs in pvp since the patch, and I’m not sure why. I mean minions got a nerf, strictly speaking (Training of the Master and Vampiric Master both got mild nerfs, right?) so I don’t get why they have such a surge in popularity. Some of the sigil changes might have been beneficial to MMs but I don’t think it’d be enough to mitigate the nerfs. Has anyone here switched to MM post-patch? And if so, why, and what changes have you made to your build?
Two things: other Necro builds are harder to play now, and also technically speaking MM didn’t get nerfed much. In my opinion the overall build actually got buffed because of the new death magic minors, which increased survivability a fair amount (an extra 2% per minion death, extra 170 toughness in DS, nerf to vampiric/training were both pretty minor).
But really I think its all the dhuumfire re-rollers finally not being able to play except for MM.
I just thought of this when seeing that my weapon swap CD was shown while in DS. I know I’m not the first person to say this but why not bring it up again: what about showing your heal/utility/elite skill CDs while in DS. They’d still be unusable, but you’d at least be able to know exact when things come off CD (allowing you to make better decisions, especially with your heal).
The one big issue I see with this is the way that DS is coded, but I think they could work around that fairly easily by taking a “snapshot” of the CDs right as you go in, and then displaying your CDs from there (since Necros don’t have anything special that’d really affect the CDs).
8s might be more realistic, I agree, I was trying to compare it to things like Rampage as One/Signet of Rage, but they also don’t have the same combos that this would.
If we got an elite well I think it would need to be something like Well of Grenth – ice field that applies chill and some other debilitating conditions (weakness/poison maybe, although I worry about it stepping on the toes of CPC). But it’d have to be something along those lines.
I would definitely like to see some kind of torment elite corruption skill.
Elite Spectral:
10s Stability
10s Spectral effect – grant 10% LF per second
Breaks Stun
60-90s CD
It grants the stability we need, in a very accessible manner without barring you from your skills. Can be used to access deathshroud on demand even if you have low LF (and will continue giving you LF).
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Frankly, I’d love to see a non-weakness related endurance play from Necromancers. Endurance siphoning was a cool idea I’ve heard a lot.
Necromancers need quite a few new weapons:
Melee power cleave
Support
Defensive OH
CC/bunker (power)
Ranged power
Melee condi
If they gave us balanced versions of the above, along with some trait reworking, and a new elite or two, Necromancers would be in an amazing spot. Not asking for things to be OP, but with just a bit of work Necros would be the most balanced prof in the game with a lot of variety.
Thankfully Necromancer isn’t in (imo) quite as bad of a position as ele was for quite a while. Unfortunately, what it will take to fix Necromancers is the addition of totally new traits and skills, which could take a while.
This post wasn’t directed at stupid warrior’s it was directed at fact there several class’s able to run Soldier’s and still do high damage. Bunker should be a bunker and burst should be a burst not both.
Who? Bunker Thieves? Bunker Necros? Bunker Mesmers?
An amulet does not make you a bunker. If there are classes that are able to run Soldiers and do high damage nerf that build then. You don’t go nerfing random kitten, especially things as limited as amulets, just because 2-3 builds can abuse it.
How many build use Soldier’s. Besides the broken builds everyone calls cancer.
Or your other option is to remove Int sigil’s from the game.
Look I’m not saying it will fix all the problem’s we are having, but it sure would fix big problem with new rune/sigil change’s where some classes can abuse.
I suggest you nerf hambow (or whatever warrior build is annoying you) if it is actually too strong. Strength runes are also a massive suspect, considering you get massive free might uptime +% damage just by having might, completely outclassing every other power rune. But instead you want to nerf literally the LEAST broken part of the problem, and the one that will affect the most non-abusive builds.
So now take away Soldier’s Amulet, what do you think happens.
You break every single build that uses soldier amulet just because warriors happen to abuse it, and then the still broken warrior build swaps over to another very similar amulet and are still too strong.
If there is a problem, you fix the problem directly. Soldiers amulet is not the problem.
Soldier’s amulet is not the problem, the problem is certain builds being able to maintain 25 might stacks with no real drawback and getting +7% damage from it while swapping weapons to get free crits. Not every profession can take advantage of this, its pretty much just warrior/elementalist (not even sure if eles use soldiers either).
Its just simple brainstorming, and I’m referring to just your own personal ideas that you’d like implemented. Don’t expect it to go any further than people blabbing about their own wishlist for Necro.
Now, I think we all know that Necromancer is one of the only professions who doesn’t bring anything particularly unique. WvW, PvE, PvP, while you can argue till you’re blue in the face about whether we are viable or not, it is not because we do something someone else can’t do, its only that we happen to do it better.
What I’d like to see are people’s ideas on skills or traits that give us something uniquely Necromancer in theme and mechanics. It can be anything as simple as just a basic mechanic idea all the way out to a fully fleshed out skill/trait complete with numbers.
Your suggestions to wait to summon them did help, but I do remember them being much better for a little while to the point I prefer ed them over the dhuum terror build.
AI was much better for a while yes, I was referencing the vamp. AI has gone through a weird set of changes.
It was fixed for a little while and while it was tanky vamp minion masters were gods.
1) Not true.
2) You can get AI to work just fine by not moving very far while melee minions are summoned.
So it really didn’t change anything on that front if you are being mindful.
Ppl need to stop whining.. i would rather have devs working on content/bugs etc etc.. then to waste their time on the forums answering stupid threads like this one. I dont think your little complaining threads are that important that it needs to be seen by devs, let alone be answered by devs. Stop QQing and start playing !!
The issue is that devs overall seem to not understand at all what is being said in the forums, and that is the easiest way to find out things that are happening. Examples? Multiple times have there been bugs for months that were completely unrecognized by the development team, in fact at least once there was a case of a skill being severely nerfed without a patch note, and the player base had no idea if it was a bug or nerf for 4 months because there was not a single dev post about it.
The reality is that a small team of devs just isn’t enough to understand every single part of the game, and so they need to utilize the forums (and other metrics), and actually show that they are using them when evidence shows otherwise.
@Bhawb I respect your opinion on this as I’ve sought out your posts on several occasions for advice in the past, so could you please elaborate? I can understand staff mark blast finishers being a little strong but not the others.
A LB projectile that when traited functions the same as Staff 1 is too strong?
Changing the field from light to water on Well of Blood is a little steep of a change, admittedly, since it’s supposedly one of the strongest heals in the game but a lot of people complain about the necro’s group utility capabilities. This would help solve that issue by granting a (traited) targeted water field that grants (traited) toughness as well.
Again, with all respect, please elaborate on why it would be “too strong of a change”.
A 20% chance on LB to finish just isn’t much of a change, imo. I thought you meant just a 100% projectile finisher, which at a 1s CD is actually really strong because of how prevalent fields are in group content. Think of it this way, if DS had a permanent 1s burning per auto, that’d be considered a massive buff (it’d literally be stronger than Dhuumfire), or if it had any of the other projectile finisher skills attached to it. Because essentially that is what would happen in team-fight cases, the skill would be constantly proccing pretty strong of buffs. As a trait? Sure, I’d probably say its balanceable, but as a flat buff it would be compensated with pretty severe nerfs to its damage (that we don’t want).
Same with staff. The marks all being blast finishers would end up basically leaving each of the skills as non-existent uses outside of finishing, because of the accompanying nerfs. Again, as a trait this could be possible, maybe a Master Death Magic trait (have them, as you said, blast THEN drop a combo field would be an easy way to avoid self finishing).
In Well of Blood’s case, it is already the single highest healing and highest scaling AoE heal in the game, bar none. It has a massive ratio, and with high healing power can heal quite a few builds for more than their own healing skill. Now in group content, allowing that to be a water field on top would make it insanely strong. My minion build, for example, would heal me for 6769 on WoB activation, then 8404 over the 11 pulses, plus 1455 for the Water rune proc, plus 3252 for each bone minion explosion. Meaning a total healing of 19880 healing (my entire HP bar) and 13111 in an AoE. That is absolutely crazy, and would result in big nerfs to WoB in some way.
In these cases, the issue is that you are proposing buffs to mainly good skills already, just maybe ones that are less common or who belong to builds that aren’t good for separate reasons (ex: WoB is strong in support/healing builds, but those builds aren’t viable, not because of WoB but because of other lacking things).
Traiting, however, is a separate thing, and could potentially introduce this, because the “cost” of the added power isn’t considered as part of the power of the skill itself, but the positioning of the trait. Essentially the issue isn’t necessarily that a base Necromancer is weak compared to another base profession, but that once you get into traiting, weapons, etc. other classes have so much better access to things than we do, and so a fully traiting other profession can bring much better and more needed things than we can. So Necromancer should be fixed not through a lot of base buffs (although some are needed in very specific spots like Axe), but through increased traiting, elite/utility skills, and weapon options.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Necros already hit the bleed cap pretty fast torment would be better.
No, a Necromancer will never hit the bleed cap on their own.
Also, a single skill being able to apply 25 stacks of bleeds is too much. Having the weakness scale up in duration might be good, but that is all I’d do with it.
All the minions are screwed, especially flesh golem. They should fix it asap.
Funny jokes.
Btw, don’t expect AI fixes soon, if ever. The problem is that summon AI directly inherits its systems from mob AI. Meaning if they kitten it up, every single AI mob in the entire game gets screwed up.
The war horn trait is one of the best traits! (When u use war horn that is) is makes #5 a 15 second swiftness with 15 ticks and more lf regen and more cripple with only a 24 sec cooldown so almost perma swiftness (9 sec not) and #4 a 3 sec daze!
Its a good trait, but it is currently bugged so it doesn’t pulse 15 times, and I also don’t think that adding a blast to 4 would make it too strong.
Staff 3—5 should be blast finishers. Staff 2 would be nice as well, but I think its cooldown is a little short to warrant it.
DS 1 should be at least a 20% projectile finisher
WoB should be a water field instead of light, since it is supposed to be blood after all.
That would be far too strong as a base change to skills.